There is a local blog I fol­low, Vin­tage Port­land, that digs through the city archives and posts vin­tage pho­tos of Port­land every few days.  Last month, they posted a photo of Pio­neer Cour­t­house from 1875, with a school in the back­ground that is now PDX’s liv­ing room, a.k.a. Pio­neer Cour­t­house Square.  I really enjoyed the photo and dis­cov­ered that the orig­i­nal image is a crazy-high resolution.

A cou­ple of weeks ago I sent the high-res image to a photo print­ing ser­vice and got a tube con­tain­ing a 16“x20” print a few days later.  A nice frame later, and I have a respectable pic­ture to hang in the the liv­ing room.

P.S. You need to watch your aspect ratios.  Those old pho­tos do not always con­form to the stan­dard 4x3 that dig­i­tal cam­eras pro­duce.  I actu­ally had two dif­fer­ent pho­tos printed, but one of the images was a lot taller than typ­i­cal pho­tos.  The ser­vice I used trun­cated it, chop­ping off the top and bot­tom, instead of let­ter­box­ing it.  The image itself was an old map, so some of the text and leg­end got chopped off, mak­ing it much less inter­est­ing and usable.  You may want to man­u­ally chop or pad your photo to remove any pos­si­bil­ity of ambiguity.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

1. “Enforce In-Order Exe­cu­tion of Input/Output” a.k.a. “Ol' Mac­Don­ald Had A Farm”
2. 30 Hour Day on the iPhone
3. Maps, Schmaps
4. Color-Your-Own Elec­toral Col­lege Map
5. We have a lovely view of the cor­rec­tional facility

Tagged as: courthouse, pioneer, pioneercourthouse, vintage